Vassallo: Educational systems and early jobs strip away natural entrepreneurial instincts
Steve Vassallo · 20VC: Why The Current Crop Of VC Does Not Understand Design, Why Product Market Fit Is A Liquid Not A Solid & How Graduates Can Optimise Their Career for Personal Development with Steve Vassallo, General Partner @ Foundation Capital · Feb 26, 2018 · at 26:38
Steve Vassallo is a General Partner at Foundation Capital, sharing lessons from his childhood snowblowing business and early career path.
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“I believe we're all natural-born entrepreneurs. Oftentimes, it gets designed out of us by our educational systems or by the very narrow nature of our first jobs or second jobs”
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“This notion of minimum viable product, I think, is in some senses cute to talk about. It's certainly something that I think for folks who are used to building, Cathedrals for prototypes. I think it's something that would help them in many regards, but I think …”
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“The middle point, in other words, going and joining a small startup where your friends are working because you know somebody there or because it, you know, sort of sounds like an interesting category, but you're not really sure because you haven't spent enough…”
Vassallo: Product-market fit is liquid, not a static destination
“Product market fit is a liquid, not a solid.”
Vassallo: VC ecosystem lacks practical resources for designer-founders
“When I looked at the venture industry that I was now part of, most of the observations were pretty high level. So there were lots of stats out there on numbers of billion dollar design founded companies or stats on LinkedIn job openings for user experience des…”
Vassallo: Designer-founders must approach business models like user experience
“And so I think most designers really need to begin to kind of step back from their sort of super strength in product design and understand that, Hey, like I also need to think about my business model in this with the same intentionality and the same focus that…”